Longform stories

I Had a Stroke at 33. Why Did Charity Johnson Pretend To Be A Teenager For Nearly 20 Years. The New Face of Hunger. Millions of working Americans don’t know where their next meal is coming from.

We sent three photographers to explore hunger in three very different parts of the United States, each giving different faces to the same statistic: of Americans don’t have enough food to eat. Click below to launch galleries Osage, IowaPhotographs by Amy ToensingOn our nation’s richest lands, farmers grow corn and soybeans used to feed livestock, make cooking oil, and produce sweeteners.

Yet one in eight Iowans often goes hungry, with children the most vulnerable to food insecurity.
Should Two Children Be Imprisoned For Plotting To Kill Their Classmates. Prematurity Rates Are Too High — And Children’s Hospitals Are Cashing In. Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?
The Controversial Answer To America's Heroin Surge.

Renewables Aren’t Enough. Clean Coal Is the Future. Coal supplies over 40 percent of global electricity needs, and that percentage is going up.

The only real question is how to minimize the damage. Dan Winters Proof that good things don’t always come in nice packages can be found by taking the fast train from Beijing to Tianjin and then driving to the coast. Tianjin, China’s third-biggest city, originated as Beijing’s port on the Yellow Sea.
Pixel And Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In The Gig Economy. "If I'm willing to pay $100 for someone to bring me a glass of fresh milk from an Omaha dairy cow right now, there might very well be a guy who would be super happy to do that, but he doesn't know that I'm the crazy guy who is willing to pay $100.

" Bo Fishback was on stage at the "Big Omaha" startup conference in 2011, trying to explain how his company Zaarly was designed to make that connection between the person with more money than time and anyone who, finding themselves in the opposite situation, could fulfill his hankering for local farm products. "It creates instantly the ultimate opt-in employment market, where there is no excuse for people who say, 'I don't know how to get a job, I don't know how to get started.'" Fishback wrapped up his presentation with a flourish: A man in a baseball cap arrived, cow in tow, with a tall plastic jug of milk.

Failure To Launch: How New Mexico Is Paying For Richard Branson's Space Tourism Fantasy. Who will get PTSD? - Ideas. Stress: The roots of resilience. Elizabeth Ebaugh is finally comfortable visiting the bridge from which she was thrown 26 years ago.

On a chilly, January night in 1986, Elizabeth Ebaugh carried a bag of groceries across the quiet car park of a shopping plaza in the suburbs of Washington DC. She got into her car and tossed the bag onto the empty passenger seat. But as she tried to close the door, she found it blocked by a slight, unkempt man with a big knife. He forced her to slide over and took her place behind the wheel.
Is PTSD Contagious?
"I Killed A Man": What Happens When A Homicide Confession Goes Viral. California's Thirsty Almonds. Dan Errotabere's family has been farming the dry soils of the western San Joaquin Valley for nearly a century.

His grandfather primarily grew wheat and other grains. His father grew vegetables and other annual crops almost exclusively. But in 1999, Errotabere decided to plant his first almond tree.
23 and You — Beautiful Stories. Cheryl has bought 16 kits from 23andMe, two for her (after her first one, she bought an updated version) and 14 on behalf of her friends and family. For each of them, she asked their permission and explained what she wanted to use the data for. But nobody ever read the forms. Still, not everybody is interested in playing the genetic genealogy game.

How Colleges Flunk Mental Health. The Dark Power of Fraternities. One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air.

And perhaps it was an excellent idea.
After the fall. Voyage of No Return - Issue 1: The Sphere - The Ascender. The drug revolution that no one can stop — Matter. MY JOURNEY, FROM MIKE POWER TO JOHN BUCKLEY, from investigative journalist to drug designer, started six weeks earlier.

To understand exactly how access to designer drugs has changed—to see exactly how easy it is to commission, purchase and import powerful new compounds that are beyond the reach of the law—I decided to get one made myself.
I challenged hackers to investigate me and what they found out is chilling. By Adam L.

Penenberg On October 26, 2013. What Facebook, Twitter, Tinder, Instagram, and Internet Porn Are Doing to America’s Teenage Girls. “In New York every kid knows each other,” and some kids are “famous,” Sydney said.

“Everyone’s obsessed with the feeling they have fame. They post pictures of themselves at certain parties. They friend certain kids.
Why Did the Schaibles Let Their Children Die?
Photo by Jonathan Barkat.

On the night of April 18th, Detective Brian Peters of the Philadelphia homicide unit saw something strange—something he’d never witnessed before—when he interviewed Herbert Schaible. Herbert’s seven-month-old son, Brandon, had died earlier that evening.
How the food stamp diet is leaving the Rio Grande Valley both hungry and obese. She had attended a nutrition class earlier in the week, and now she held a sheet listing federally recommended foods in one hand while sorting through her fridge to take inventory with the other. “Fresh vegetables,” the sheet suggested, and Blanca found two rotting tomatoes, a package of frozen broccoli and two containers of instant vegetable soup.
Hana Williams: The tragic death of an Ethiopian adoptee, and how it could happen again.
On the night of May 11, 2011, sometime around midnight, 13-year-old Hana Williams fell face-forward in her parents’ backyard.